Comment by strogonoff
Comment by strogonoff 17 hours ago
I find the following to be a great point regarding what we ought to consider when adapting our lifestyle to reduce negative environmental impact:
> In deciding what to cut, we need to factor in both how much an activity is emitting and how useful and beneficial the activity is to our lives.
The further example with a hospital emitting more than a cruise ship is a good illustration of the issue.
Continuing this line of thought, when thinking about your use of an LLM like ChatGPT, you ought to weigh not merely its emissions and water usage, but also the larger picture as to how it benefits the human society.
For example: Was this tech built with ethically sound methods[0]? What are its the foreseeable long-term effects on human flourishing? Does it cause a detriment to livelihoods of the many people while increasing the wealth gap with the tech elites? Does it negatively impact open information sharing (willingness to run self-hosted original content websites or communities open to public, or even the feasibility of doing so[1][2]), motivation and capability to learn, creativity? And so forth.
[0] I’m not going to debate utilitarianism vs. deontology here, will just say that “the ends justify the means” does not strike me as a great principle to live by.